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I've just found out that there's a wrestling move called 'Sliced Bread #2'. How embarrassing. Anyway, that's not where the title of this journal comes from. I thought it up when I was in high school and always wanted to use it for something.

Thanks to blogger.com for the hosting and the template. Content is copyright Dennis Relser (M. Elmslie) 2004-05.

Saturday, November 27, 2004

I was reading a concert review this afternoon. The Silly Overlords had played at the Bloodstream, and I missed it, so I was reading the review to see what I missed. Turns out their drummer, Crazy Mike Marzenko, didn't show and they had to use a replacement guy. Marzenko is famous for his unreliability; he misses about half the group's performances.

But then elsewhere in the paper I saw that Mr. Peppermint Man busted a bunch of terrorists hiding in one of those drive-up storage facilities out by the airport. And I got to thinking.

Mr. Peppermint Man is one of those superheroes who isn't tied to any one city. He's as likely to show up in one place as another. So if he had any kind of a secret identity, it'd have to be someone who was on the road a lot. Like, say, someone in a band.

I went to the Overlords website and pulled up a list of the shows they played over the past year or so. Then I searched for concert reviews for those shows, and marked down the ones Marzenko missed. Then I searched for what Mr. Peppermint Man was up to those evenings. Every time Marzenko missed a show, Mr. Peppermint Man was breaking some heads in the same city. To me, that's confirmation. Am I the first guy to notice this?

Should I get word to Marzenko that I'm onto him, I thought. I still haven't decided. Maybe I will. What I did do is this. I called up Greyghost and said, "You know that thing you have next Tuesday?"

"The Empire City Artists Guild speech."

"Yeah. You should miss it. Blow it off."

"Why? What's happened?"

"Nothing."

He was silent.

"See, this way it breaks up your pattern a bit. You can't help missing some of your commitments, but we don't want each thing you miss coming at the same time as Greyghost bringing in the Rampaging Radiator."

"Yes, I understand."

"Spend some time with Ingrid instead. Maybe that way when she hangs around down here she'll have something to talk about other than the way you don't spend enough time with her."

"I'll consider it. It's a good notion."

A little rough on the artists of Empire City, but a good day's work nonetheless.

But this entry rings false. Greyghost would have taken steps to break up his patterns from day one. The intelligence community trains people for that as a matter of course, and Greyghost is smarter than they are.

However. I'd fanwank (writerwank?) my way out of it like this. First, Greyghost does all kinds of stuff to break his patterns and cover his tracks that Dennis never gets to see. This is actually true; Dennis isn't privy to great swaths of what Greyghost gets up to.

Second, while Greyghost is in fact extremely intelligent, he also has his blind spots, and I could see how this could be one of them. Which is exactly why he keeps Dennis around in the first place.